Last week we were having a leisurely walk in Brockwell Park, an estate set out in the early nineteenth century, complete with mansion, walled gardens and huge greenhouses, and now a park bordered by Brixton and Tulse Hill in South London. Back in the eighties I remember brief walks there with the dog between school runs and it wasn’t a place to linger. Now the elegant lido has a gym and café, there are tennis courts and a couple of fantastic playgrounds and the old greenhouses are being used by the local community. There are plenty of mature trees and there is some interesting landscaping around the duck ponds. We were admiring the grasses looking their best in the autumn sunshine when we rounded a corner and lo and behold, there was a municipal Lambeth truck being piled high with said grasses, leaving… bare earth. By now, being a public park, they might have been replaced with some sort of winter bedding but I thought at the time that it really was an example of too much tidying, too soon.

Time to rake up those autumn leaves
- words: Sue Whigham
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